You are browsing the Blog for who is the girl with the dragon tattoo.

From the top 100 books in Amazon, they don’t come much more recommended than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The book has held it’s place in Amazon’s best selling list in the top 100 for nearly two years (at the time of writing at least) and has over 1200 reviews with an average four star rating in the UK alone. In itself that is some recommendation, the author has not only prompted that many people to firstly write a review, no mean feat, but then secondly to maintain such a high standard of recommendation.Stieg Larsson could certainly have been proud of his achievement had he lived to see his success. This even more astonishing when you consider that this was his début novel and was published posthumously after his death, due to a heart attack, in 2005. Here we are in 2012 and it is still selling by the millions.

So what is the book about: It is the first of a trilogy called the The Millenium Triology and is essentially a crime novel set primarily in Sweden, Stieg Larsson’s native country.

It covers the disappearance of Harriet Vanger a member of a very wealthy Swedish family some forty years earlier. Mikael Blomkvist a journalist is hired to investigate the case and establish exactly what happened to Harriet. Her uncle in his eighties and now approaching the end of his life stongly suspects she was murdered and wants to find out exactly what happened to her. His own investigations since her disappearance have all drawn a blank which is why he turns to Blomkvist.

Blomkvist teams up with the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, to investigate the case. Both parties are to an extent damaged goods themselves. Blomkvist has just lost a libel case effectively making him a disgraced journalist and Salander, at only 24 years old, is an extremely ruthless but highly talented computer hacker who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her legal guardian. This is not a one sided affair however, she uses a hidden camera to record his abuse and then uses that to get her revenge and freedom from his control, rather unpleasantly it has to be said.

Discoveries of corruption at the highest levels are made, surprising links back to the central characters are revealed and all the characters in the book demonstrate a deep and dark side to their past and present lives. The plot twists and turns, leads to dead ends, unanswered questions and many completely illogical discoveries. It is also a book about sexual abuse of the worst kind and the central character, Lisbeth, was construed as a result of Larsson witnessing a rape when he was only fifteen years old.

As you can see the book is now also a film and it is said that the American version is closer to the original book than the Swedish version. That’s sounds a bit unusual, and I guess that it will need to be left to you to decide if it’s true.

Purchase this Book

Available now from Amazon in Kindle format, you can be reading it in minutes if you chose the Kindle version. Use the links below: